Burne-Jones was wont to be lavish of these humorous sketches in letters to his intimate friends, and I have one or two supposed to illustrate a projected fresh departure in his Art, wherein, under the impulse of a new resolve, he was to abandon finally all future effort after ideal design, and, conforming to that taste of the public which he had hitherto failed to satisfy, to embark upon a series of pictures to represent, as he told me, the homes of England. “I enclose a sketch,” he writes, “for my next picture. It is a new departure, but the public [Illustration: FACSIMILE OF A LETTER By Sir EDWARD BURNE-JONES, Bart. (_a_). _To face page 78._ ] [Illustration: THE HOMES OF ENGLAND From an original drawing by Sir EDWARD BURNE-JONES, Bart. (_b_). _To face page 78._ ] [Illustration: THE HOMES OF ENGLAND. From an original drawing by Sir EDWARD BURNE-JONES, Bart. (_c_). _To face page 78._ ] must be humoured. I have fought the fight of unpopularity long enough. Tell me what you think,” and accompanying this startling announcement of the fresh direction his art was to take, he enclosed, not a mere sketch, but an elaborately finished black and white drawing of the first of the great series he had projected, wherein he had evidently intended to present a typical representative of our great commercial nation--a hideous being stretched in stertorous sleep upon a Victorian sofa of abominable design, every deformed curve and moulding of which he had rendered with searching veracity. I must have sent him in reply some burlesque welcome of the revolution in his style indicated by the design, for in a day or two I received a second drawing more monstrous and grotesque than the first, and with the drawing he wrote: “You divine my purpose. It was the first of a series to be called the Homes of England.” But even in these essays in the grotesque, and in the lighter and sometimes very graceful fancies which he would illustrate so easily and so rapidly for our amusement, or for the delight of our children, there was always an unfailing sense of composition and design. One afternoon on the lawn of Lady Lewis’s cottage at Walton, where we often met, and where so many happy hours of my life have been spent, he was discussing in a bantering mood the reproach so often levelled against him, that his female forms were lean and meagre and lacked the sense of flesh and blood. “I think,” he said, “I must make a more determined study of the manner of Rubens,” and thereupon, taking a sheet of paper from the table where Lady Lewis was writing, he began at once to compose a picture of “Susannah and the Elders,” after the manner of the great Flemish master. It took him only a few minutes to accomplish, and yet, as it lies before me now, admirable as it is in its sense of caricature, it is no less striking for a certain beauty in the ordered arrangement of line which could not desert him even when he was proposing to lampoon himself.